Gameloft‘s Assassin’s Creed has been whispered to be soft-footing it toward our favourite buttonless platform in what is destined to be the biggest gaming year for the iDevice to date [sic]. If either Assassin’s Creed or the name Altairr ings a bell, it is because the DS sported both in a port from the successful XBOX and Playstation 3 titles. So, in the spirit of other ports from the DS, Gameloft will bring us the stealthy thriller for the iPhone as early as next week. Be sure to check out our review.

Yeah, Apple have been raking in the dosh with the App Store. To celebrate their newly built greenhouse, they are holding a One Billion App Countdown Contest. You stand to win a lot though, likely, the odds are rather unfavourable. All you have to do is buy an app or fill out a form until the One Billion Countdown is over.

These days, Apple are demanding a lot from their users. Even back in their Golden Years, they demanded that mac users learn how to use a mouse, which quickly evolved into easy-to-use computering and later, forced adoption of the fast, well volted firewire. Recently, we have had to say goodbye to firewire, usable usb ports, removeable batteries and lastly, impunity to create weapons from our DRM-free songs in the iTunes Store.

redsn0w beta jailbreak for the iPod Touch 2G is now available for those who don’t mind a bit of typing. One step closer to point and click GUI hacking, the iPhone Dev Team are making leaps and bounds progress on this platform that has been comparatively sidelined from the jailbreak scene. With promise of future GUI jailbreaks just down the track, the Dev Team race on.

For those of you who are not satisfied with the likes of Monster Turbine or Audeo PFE and want to strap on the big wallet, look for a new product from Westone called the UM3X aimed at musicians and priced at 379$ USD. Some will call the sum paltry but to most, 379$ is too much rent to spend on a music hobby or for your on-the-go listening pleasure. For those who have to have the priciest and best in universal inner earphone technology, the Westone units compete with products from: Ultimate Ears, Sennheiser, Audio Technica, Etymotic and Shure among others.

Westone are held in highest regard in the personal monitor industry and have over 50 years of expertise to dedicate to their monitors. If the Westone 3′s hype is anything to go by, the UM3X will be a force to be reckoned with for personal stage monitors.

Mimicry is the highest form of flattery or, in some cases, competition. This time, a cheap Chinese knock-off company trying to grab headlines is not our subject, but rather one of the Goliath’s of portable gaming: Sony. According to PocketGamer, an inside source has admitted Sony’s chagrine at lately being eclipsed by the brouhaha riddled iPhone – considering the iPhone’s gaming success and first rate online store, this is hardly an eye-blinker.

Up close and personal the iPhone’s bigger cousin: a large toucscreen table from touchtech – Illusion Labs show off their unique hits, Touchgrind and Sway. We expect that this sort of productioin is what could be expected from Illusion Labs in particular and from other developers in general if Apple were to release a larger touch panel based product to market.

In what is sure to be a complex proceeding, shigzeo of TMA was arrested on a recent business trip to God’s Country. While specific names and locations will remain undisclosed, it is clear to us is that he was arrested while out in the rural countryside around New York State’s largest city. Purportedly, shigzeo had a scoop that took him and his much loved Marnoni Fango bicycle across the border to visit the home of someone who knew, “the biggest news ever to be upped onto The Internets”.We said goodbye to him at 10:00 am this morning and have not properly heard from him since.

Engadget report on a picture included in a recent patent application by Apple which displays a jailbreaked summerboard and a few apps that only Jailbreaked iPhones can run. After Apple’s bruhaha legal paper detailing the illegality of Jailbreaking and its detrimental effects on their service standards, the hand-drawn images surprise and confuse. Bafflement aside, the new patent is quite clear: more security for the iPhone user.

As we mentioned last week, this move was expected today, but not by Apple. If you amble on by the Apple store, you won’t have to already be an AT&T customer to pick up an iPhone, nor are you limited to one phone per customer as you are at AT&T.

Naturally, end-of-life for the 3G is rapidly approaching and Apple are eager to rid their shelves of these beauties. However, be prepared to shovel out 599$ for the 8GB model and 699$ for the 16GB badboy – me? I’ll be grabbing three of each on a run down to God’s Country over the weekend.

AppleInsider also report that the newly purchased iPhone can be activated via iTunes and that AT&T contract is still mandatory, but there are ways to get out of that.